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anno I, numero 1, 2013
SALLY HICKSON
THE INGANNO OF GIUSEPPE OROLOGI.
ON DECEPTION AND SEDUCTION
IN ART AND COLLECTING
In 1562, the Gioliti press in Venice published the dialogue L’Inganno,
written by a fairly obscure Veronese humanist named Giuseppe
Orologi1. It appears to be the first treatise in the Italian vernacular to
exclusively address the subject of deceit, a concept earlier
symbolized in the emblems of Andrea Alciati, appearing for the first
time in the Venice edition of 15462. Labelled «In fraudulentos»,
Alciati depicts deceit in the form of a spotted gecko, accompanied by
a verse which begins: «The little lizard, a newt bestarred on his body
with black spots, who inhabits hiding places and hollow tombs, bears
1
G. OROLOGI, L’Inganno. Dialogo di M. Gioseppe Horologgi, Venice, Gabriele
Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1562. I consulted copies in the Beinecke Library at Yale
University and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of
Toronto. I would like to thank the librarians at both those institutions for their
helpfulness in my research. I’d also like to thank my colleagues at the University
of Guelph for their kind support of my research, and thank you to the University
of Ferrara and to the editors of the present volume for inviting my participation.
2
For works on lying, plagiarism and issues related to fraud and deceit in early
modern art see the Introduction to Sh. GREGORY & S.A. HICKSON, Inganno – The
Art of Deception: Imitation, Reception and Deceit in Early Modern Art, Aldershot,
Ashgate, 2012. For more on Orologi, please see my essay in that collection. All
of the editions of Alciati’s Emblematum Liber, in their various translations, are
now valuable at: http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/index.php. The
edition to which I refer is the Emblematum Libellus, Venice, Aldus, 1546, at 7r.
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in his colouring symbols of envy and depraved deceit»3. By the time
of the Italian edition of Alciati’s book, produced in Lyons in 1551, the
concept of deceit had expanded to two different emblems; the
«Fraudulent» represented by the spotted gecko, and «Deceit against
one’s own», represented by a duck that leads their own unwitting
brace into a hunter’s net4. When Cesare Ripa produced his
Iconologia, in 1593, the subject of inganno had grown even more
complex, taking several forms; the figure of a gold-clothed man
whose body ends in two tapering snake’s tails, a two-faced woman
with a serpent’s tail, a goat-skin clad man carrying fish-hooks and a
net full of fish, tricked into being caught through the fisherman’s
deception, and finally a male figure dressed in yellow, olding fishhooks in one hand and, in the other, a bouquet of flowers from
which a snake emerges5. The main observation to be made about
this evolution, aside from its gradual refinement into different kinds
of deceit, is its metamorphoses from animal to human form. Clearly,
by the end of the sixteenth century, there was an increased
preoccupation with the art of human deception in its myriad forms.
Orologi’s dialogue, then, offered a contemporary reflection on the
increasingly complex facets of deception and fraud in the practices
of everyday life.
This essay deals with only one aspect of Orologi’s interest in the
art of deception, and that is with the deception of art itself. In its
very nature as a practice of imitation, art was long perceived to be an
exercise in deceiving the senses. However, the growing status of art
objects as both intellectual and economic commodities in Orologi’s
time created a mania for conspicuous consumption that led
collectors to deceive each other in their frenzy to acquire objects, to
falsely assume an expertise in evaluating the worth of such objects,
3
In the 1546 edition (see n. 2), the verse appears in Latin: «Parva lacerta, atris
stellatus corpora guttis | Stellio, qui latebras, & cava busta colit, | Invidiae
praviq’; doli fert symboli pictus. | Heu nimium nuribus cognita zelotypis. |Nam
turpi obtegitur faciem lentigine quisquis, |Sit quibus immersus stellio, vina
bibat. | Hinc vindicta frequens decepta pellice vino, |Quim formae amisso store
relinquit amans».
4
A. ALCIATI, Diverse Imprese, Lyons, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille,
1551, pp. 52 and 53.
5
C. RIPA, Iconologia overo descrittioni dell’imagini universali, &c., Rome, Gioliti,
1593, p. 152 s.; see http://www.labirintoermetico.com/04Iconologia/Ripa_Cesare_Iconologia_(1593).PDF.
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Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
and to confuse ownership and acquisition with self-worth, self-image
and self-knowledge6. The result was a continuous chain of deception
and self-deception, which Orologi examines in his treatment of
deception in art7. Not only was all art illusion, but its true value was
also frequently confused with its illusory value as a signifier of wealth
and erudition. In Orologi’s analysis, the status of art and antiquities
as commodities filled the new, modern cognoscenti with an allencompassing appetite for their consumption and drove them to
fraudulent practices:
There are some in Rome called antiquarians by everyone, who assume
the task of recognizing everything and they say the most lying and
scurrilous things in the world [...] This type of man is accustomed to
playing strange jokes on the moderns using the appearance of ancient
figures, and they say things and then they go back and say them again in
a manner better suited to their purpose, finding others’ ears welldisposed to believe everything they feel like saying. And I liken them to
dreams that feature things both present and past, but never wholly as
8
they are, or as they were .
By mid-century, following the Sack of Rome in 1527, Venice,
where Orologi lived, worked and wrote in the latter half of the
century, had quickly supplanted Rome and even Florence as the
Italian center of artistic production. By the 1560s, when Orologi was
in Venice, Sansovino’s all’antica motifs graced the colonnades of the
Marciana library, and provided an impregnable but graceful
architectural screen for the Venetian zecca. Veronese, Tintoretto and
Titian were at work on an astonishing array of sacred and secular
6
For collecting as a «status symbol activity» in which agents and antiquaries
had a personal stake, see B. FURLOTTI, Connecting people, connecting places:
antiquarians as mediators in sixteenth-century Rome, «Urban History», 37,
2010, pp. 386-398; she mentions Orologi at p. 390.
7
A case of excessive antiquarian mania and self-deception in the case of an
early 18th-century antiquarian is explored by A. GRAFTON, Jean Hardouin: The
Antiquary as Pariah, «Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes», 62,
1999, pp. 241-267.
8
«Questa maniera d’huomini sogliono far il piu delle volte di strani scherzo a i
moderni con le apparenze delle figure antiche, e dicono, e ridicono come lor
torna meglio; trovando le orecchie altrui ben disposte a dar credenza a tutto
quel, che vien loro in animo di dire, & io li assimiglio a I sogni che rapresentano
e le cose presenti & le passate; ma non mai del tutto come sono, ne come
furono già» (OROLOGI, L’Inganno, cit., fol. 125).
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paintings. At the same time, many Venetian collectors were
accumulating vast collections of antiquities for display in their
impressive palazzi along the Grand Canal. Casting a cynical, and
undoubtedly slightly satirical, eye on this vast wealth of material
objects, Orologi decried the wealth of deceptions that underlay the
spirit of plenty. While in Orologi’s view, all men deceive through their
appearance and their behavior, he was particularly critical of
collectors and merchants of art and antiquities who «love those
mute (and) insensible things more than enough; with little respect
for God, who gave them life and breath; so that they are already
mad and lost to that artificial beauty, leaving them to vent their love
on marble reduced by art into a human semblance»9. The material,
he warned, resulted in moral and spiritual privation.
Orologi’s own preoccupation with matters of art is inherent in his
very choice of interlocutors for his dialogue, Lodovico Dolce and
Girolamo Ruscelli, fellow editors of his at the Gioliti press in Venice.
Dolce and Ruscelli had both earned their public distinction through
frequenting academic and artistic circles among the city’s growing
intellectual, academic and artistic classes. Dolce, in particular, had
gained contemporary fame for the famous dialogue he wrote on the
art of painting, the so-called Aretino, a spirited defense of the art of
Titian and of Raphael10. Ruscelli spent some time as part of an
Accademia Segreta, publishing a Book of Secrets under the
pseudonym Alexis of Piedmont, as well as editing and annotating
editions of important Italian literary texts11. Dolce, Ruscelli and
Orologi all worked among the Venetian poligrafi as editors for the
Gioliti press. Orologi’s publication of the Inganno was perhaps
conceived as his own entree into the arena of public intellectual
debate, and although the tone of the dialogue itself is somewhat
9
«Et pur ci sono di quelli a tempi nostri che amano assai piu queste mutte, &
insensibili; con poco rispetto al grande Iddio; che le vive, e spirituali; & ce ne
furono gia; che impazziti, e perduti per quella artificiosa bellezza, si lasciarono
sdrucciolare a sfogar il loro Amore; con il marmo ridotto dall’arte alla sembianza
humana» (ivi, fol. 126).
10
For an analysis in English of Dolce’s Aretino see M. ROSKILL, Dolce’s Aretino
and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto, University of Toronto
Press, 2000.
11
W. EAMON, Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: The
"Professors of Secrets" and Their Books, «Sixteenth Century Journal», 16, 1985,
pp. 471-485.
110
Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
tongue-in-cheek, his passages on art carry a sting of serious social
criticism. Using Dolce and Ruscelli as his authorities on intellectual
life in modern Venice, Orologi constructed a cynical dialogue about
the widespread inclination of his peers to deceive each another in
every possible way, and his work provides some lively and surprising
insights into contemporary Venetian intellectual, literary and artistic
culture.
Dolce and Ruscelli begin the dialogue by agreeing that it is the
nature of man to deceive, but that there are various forms of
deception. There are deceptions that are obvious and therefore
harmless, such as the card-tricks and sleights of hand performed by
gypsies, and those which are endemic to human nature, more
destructive because they are hidden from sight through false
appearances. As Ruscelli says, «those who take the part of deception
might be very similar to the gypsies if you could recognize them, but
because they are hidden and masked by the mask of the world, you
can’t tell them from the others, except as I said for their effects»12.
To see deception, one must see through the appearance to the
reality. Such a paradigm is, of course, perfectly suited to the
discussion of art which occurs about midway through their
conversation.
Ruscelli begins this discussion by venturing that «almost all of the
arts are a mixture of appearance and of substance, and the art of
painting, as you can see, participates more in appearance than all the
other arts, being that its perfection is founded, in the force of its
colors and the artifice of its lines, in creating a subtle deception for
the eyes and making them see on a flat plane bodies in relief in
various ways»13. For this reason, painters are the most practiced of
deceivers:
12
«Quelli che sono da la parte che inganna sarebbero molto simil a i Cingari se
si conoscessero, come quelli; ma perche vanno di nascosto, e mascherati de la
maschera del mondo, non si conoscono da gli altri, se non come ho detto per gli
effetti» (OROLOGI, L’Inganno, cit., fol. 2).
13
«Quasi tutte le arti sono un mischio di apparentia, & di esistentia; & l’arte
della pittura come si vede, partecipa assai piu dell’apparenza che tutte le
altr’arti, essendo tutta la sua perfettione fondata; in far che la forza de i colori;
& l’artificio delle linee; facciano un dolce inganno a gli occhi, facendoli apparere
una equalità piana; corpi rilevati, in diverse maniere» (ivi, fol. 96).
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We can say that their art is nothing more than a continual deception,
and an endless cheat, that with lines artificially colored, and with various
shades and contours they make appear before the eyes of others things
that are not; and the crazy world that knows that their works are
nothing other than fictions, false appearances and deceptions,
nevertheless reap the full sail, valuing many times more a wall, or piece
of wood or canvas, being taken in by the artificial delight of scrawled
14
colors .
For Dolce, however, the deceptive nature of painting is not nearly
as dangerous as its misuse by those who exploit it for their own
ends, particularly the art of portraiture which, of course, offers only
the merest semblance of the self.
The rich and powerful are wont to love this art, having
themselves drawn «del naturale» — at all stages, driven by the vain
desire to immortalize themselves this way, covering their ambition in
this pursuit with the veil of virtue15.
14
«Potiam dire che l’arte loro non e altro che un inganno continuo; & una
gionteria senza fine, che con linee artificiosamente colorate; con varie ombre, &
varij contorni, fanno apparer a gli occhi altrui quel che non e; e’l mondo pazzo
che conosce che le loro opre non sono altro che fittioni, fuchi apparenze, &
inganni; si lascia però cogliere a piene vele, a stimar piu, molti volte un pezzo di
muraglia, o di bosco, o di tela tutta piena, tratti da quella artificiosa vaghezza de
colori impiastrati, che fine relevi, motti, scurzi, lontani, & figure in vari gesti,
mute & senza spirito, che le figure vere sensibili & spiritali, che si movono da
dovero, tanto e vago di lasciarse cogliere da gli inganni» (ivi, fol. 95).
15
«I Ricchi e potenti sogliono amare quest’arte; facendose ritrare del naturale
in tutte le etati sue spinti dal vano desiderio di immortalarsi per mezzo suo,
coprendo la loro ambitione in questa parte con il velo della virtù, dicendo che i
loro antichi, come quelli ch’erano pieni di valore, volsero ancora lasciando a
quelli che venivano dopo, i ritratti al naturale di se stessi lasciar quella memoria,
a fin che come in uno specchio s’havessero del continuo a specchiar nelle loro
opere virtuose mirando le faccie loro, & accendersi con ogni spirito a imitarle; &
con questo colore di virtù vanno adombrando e miniando l’ambition sua, che è
senza fine; la loro pazzia ancora che non ha un minimo che di rossore a lasciar a
i loro descendenti, il ritratto di quei loro visacci schiffi, & balordi, che rendono
spavento a chi i mira vivi, vedete quel che debbono fare non havendo ne senso,
ne spirito, le loro simiglianza distese da meschi di colori, onde che i mira per di
fuori & conosce i forfanti a affetti del loro animo plebeo per di dentro sta in
dubbio che habbia piu schiffezza in se il ritratto della faccia o quello di i loro
vicii: non vi essendo alcun vantaggio; & se pur vene è serà nella faccia» (ivi, fols.
96-97).
112
Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
Moreover, he continues, «they do not so much as blush to leave
to their descendents a portrait of their loathesome ill-favored faces;
such fools are those that fear their living aims, seeing what they
must do, having neither sense nor spirit, their likenesses expanses of
mixed wine colors that seek themselves from outside and know that
on the inside their base souls are in doubt as to who has more
loathesomeness in them, the portrait of the face or the living soul»16.
The discussion then moves on to sculpture, which Dolce suggests
is less deceptive than painting because, being in relief, it does not
deceive the eyes the same way that painting does in trying to give
dimension to a flat surface. Ruscelli, however, counters this by
pointing out that deceptions of sculpture do not exist in its material
form, but rather in what it leads people to believe about the nature
of truth, particularly «the ambitious who seek to have themselves
cast and sculptured in order to believe that they will live forever»
and are fooled by the «ravenousness of time [which] buries them to
their neck, their arms, their nose and their legs so that they resemble
Maestro Pasquino, and at that moment they find themselves in such
bad repair that no one knows them for anything but resurrected
fragments»17.
Although it is possible that the whole of the Inganno was
conceived by Orologi as nothing more than a diversion, a
passatempo designed to deceive time by causing it to pass
unnoticed; his observations on the nature of art can be interpreted
to have more substantial and serious implications. At heart, of
course, the whole discussion of painting versus sculpture relates very
specifically to the contemporary paragone debates except, of course,
that the real debate in the Inganno is not about the relative
superiority of painting over sculpture, or vice-versa, but over which is
16
Ibid.
«La scultura ancora ha la sua apparenza, con la quale inganna gli occhi de i
goffi & ignoranti; ingannando medesimamente gli ambitiosi che si fanno coniare
e scolpire dandose a credere di viverci perpetuamente almeno di mettalo, o di
marmo poi che non ci possono viver come sono; o con qualche fama vera di
valore immortale; & non piu presto dicono a Dio al mondo che la ingordiggia del
tempo i sotterra fiaccandogli il colo, le braccia, il naso, o le cambe che
assimigliano poi dissotterate a maestro Pasquino & talhora si trovano cosi
mal’acconci che non è alcuno che i conosca per altro che per fragmenti di figure
de rileno» (ivi, fol. 124).
17
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inherently more deceptive, not in its nature but in its intent18.
Pictures can lie in their appearance but sculpture lies in its very
materiality, because it mimics the substance of living beings, existing
as form without spirit.
This aspect of the discussion leads me to reconsider several
contemporary portraits of collectors in their studioli, surrounded by
their mute, insensible objects of desire. For that reason, for the
remainder of this paper I wish to examine Orologi’s criticisms of art
collecting in light of portraits of contemporary Venetian merchants
and collectors involved in the antiquarian trade. Although there is, as
yet, no comprehensive history of the profession of the antiquarian in
the Renaissance, Orologi’s dialogue offers interesting insights into
conflicting economies of expertise, at least in Venice, between the
new merchants of culture and cittadino and non-cittadino
consumers19.
For example, we might well imagine Lorenzo Lotto’s melancholic
Andrea Odoni (1527, Windsor, Royal Collection) falling victim to this
love for «marble reduced by art into a human semblance», forever
surrounded by the mute vestiges of fragmentary statues, their
identities lost through the vagaries of time. To one side of the
collector, Anteus wrestles with Hercules; a demi-god striving to
uproot the giant rooted in the earth and thus destroy him,
undoubtedly a trope for the very awakening of statues. To his other
side a strangely lifelike bronze flickers with animation in the shadow
of a headless Hercules. Diana Wronski Gallis once posited that
Lotto’s portrait was a warning against collecting earthly treasures, a
conclusion roundly rejected by scholars, if only because it seems
impossible that Odoni would want to have himself depicted in such a
18
For the paragoni debates see L. MENDELSOHN, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s
Due Lezzioni and Cinquecento Art Theory, Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1982.
19
For general insights into the role of antiquarians in sixteenth century
culture, some major sources are R. WEISS, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical
Antiquity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969; F. HASKELL, Patrons and Painters: Art and
Society in Baroque Italy, New York, Harper & Row, 1971; CH.L. STINGER, The
Renaissance in Rome, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Univ. of Indiana Press, 1998;
see B. FURLOTTI, Connecting people, connecting places: antiquarians as mediators
in sixteenth-century Rome, «Urban History», 370, 2010, pp. 386-398, for
excellent sources in the emergent literature on merchants and agents involved
in the antiquarian trade.
114
Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
moralizing tone20. More Recently, Monika Schmitter, in response to a
recent cleaning of the painting which reveals that Odoni is fingering a
gold crucifix around his neck, has posited that «the painting is a
reflection upon the values and meanings of collecting as much it is a
“portrait of a collector”»21. Lotto’s theme might well be vanity – the
shining light of spiritual immortality perhaps dimmed in the
lengthening shadow of the past cast by the resurrection of antiquity.
A comparison between Lotto’s Odoni and Parmigianino’s slightly
earlier Portrait of a Collector (London, National Gallery, before 1524),
reveal that Lotto’s meditation was but a continuing reflection on
similar themes, evoking in the mind of the viewer possible
admonitions against being lured by the enticements of antique
sculpture. Parmigianino’s unidentified sitter is flanked to the left by
an ancient marble relief depicting Venus, Mars and Cupid, and a
painted landscape, and to the right by a bronze statue of Ceres –
love and abundance, the hallmarks of human indulgence. Ancient
medals, typical symbols of human vanity, are scattered on the table.
The sitter holds a breviary, which has been identified as the Offiziolo
Durazzo, an illuminated book of hours (now housed in the Biblioteca
Civica Berio at Genoa), made by the artist Francesco Marmitta22. The
gold lettering and purple parchment of the manuscript make it the
most elegant and material of iterations on the necessity to cultivate
the spiritual and eternal and to resist the siren call of material luxury.
The sitter seems to epitomize the struggle between the spiritual,
ephemeral and eternal and the material vestiges of a measureable
and material past; he stands poised on a continuum of time that
20
N. SCHNEIDER, The Art of the Portrait: Masterpieces of European Portraitpainting, 1420-1670, Köln, Benedikt Taschen, 1994, p. 101.
21
M. SCHMITTER, “Virtuous Riches”: The Bricolage of Cittadini Identities in EarlySixteenth-Century Venice, «Renaissance Quarterly», 57, 2004, pp. 908-969: p.
955.
22
At least one drawing by Marmitta, of an Entombment, related to
illuminations in this codice, is now in the collection of the British Museum.
Marmitta, who hailed from Parma and died in in c1505, was probably
commissioned by the sitter to illuminate this Book of Hours, see the British
Museum entry o this drawing at: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=7
17549&partid=1&output=Terms%2F!!%2FOR%2F!!%2F13264%2F!%2F%2F!%2F
Emilian%2F!%2F%2F!!%2F%2F!!!%2F&orig=%2Fresearch%2Fsearch_the_collect
ion_database%2Fadvanced_search.aspx&currentPage=5&numpages=10.
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reaches from the past towards eternity. In Dolce’s words, «there are
those who in our time love those mute and insensible things more
than enough; with little respect for God; who gives them life and
breath; so that they are already mad and lost to that artificial beauty,
leaving them to vent their love on marble reduced by art into a
human semblance»23.
Tintoretto’s rather strange portrait of a Young Man with a Bust of
Lucrezia (1553-55, Münich, Alte Pinacothek) seems to further echo
Orologi’s passage on the collector’s all-consuming love for dead
marble24. The bust of Lucrezia is markedly similar to the now greatly
ruined pasquina sculpture (albeit less monumental), fondly referred
to as Madonna Lucretia still located just off the Piazza Venezia in
Rome25. Lucrezia is, of course, the self-sacrificing symbol of Roman
fidelity. The young man stands next to her fragmentary figure in
much the same attitude as Rembrandt’s later Aristotle would
contemplate the bust of Homer; provoking a meditation on the past,
although the subject of the dialogue between past and present in
the Tintoretto remains shrouded in mystery. Is this to be read as a
double portrait in flesh and stone? an act of mourning? a pledge of
love? a regretful rumination on the Roman past? Or could it perhaps
be an allusion to the pride of the collector or to the arrogance of the
antiquarian? – the type of man who, according to Orologi, «is
accustomed to playing strange jokes on the moderns using the
appearance of ancient figures» and whom he accuses of being
faithful «to dreams that feature things both present and past, but
never wholly as they are, or as they were»26.
23
See n. 9: «Et pur ci sono di quelli a tempi nostri che amano assai piu queste
mutte, & insensibili; con poco rispetto al grande Iddio; che le vive, e spirituali; &
ce ne furono gia; che impazziti, e perduti per quella artificiosa bellezza, si
lasciarono sdrucciolare a sfogar il loro Amore; con il marmo ridotto dall’arte alla
sembianza humana» (OROLOGI, L’Inganno, cit., fol. 126).
24
TINTORETTO, Opere Complete, a c. di R. Pallucchini e P. Rossi, Milano, Electa,
1982, I (Ritratti, 80)..
25
The so-called Madonna Lucretia is not nearly as well known as the Pasquino
himself, or the Marforio; for the tradition of the Pasquino statues see L. BARKAN,
Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance
Culture, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1999, pp. 209-230.
26
«Questa maniera d’huomini sogliono far il piu delle volte di strani scherzo a
i moderni con le apparenze delle figure antiche, e dicono, e ridicono come lor
torna meglio; trovando le orecchie altrui ben disposte a dar credenza a tutto
116
Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
In Orologi’s world collectors are actually not so much possessors
as possessed by the objects they allow to consume them. For
example, if we look through Orologi’s eyes at Titian’s portrait of the
Venetian collector Jacopo Strada (1567, Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna), the avaricious antiquarian reveals himself to be obsessed by
conspicuous wealth and perhaps deceived by the very objects he
purports to possess. Titian depicts Strada clad in the luxurious but
slightly absurd fur of his mantle, choked by the encircling loops of his
heavy gold chain, from which dangles an even heavier gold
medallion. As he gazes towards us, he caresses a statue of Venus as
though she might awaken to his touch. In some ways, he seems
almost as crass and carnal as the coins scattered before him on the
table27.
Orologi might well have had good reason to resent the
pretensions of Strada whom, it is said, Titian also disliked. Strada was
the epitome of the academy-sanctioned intellectual that Orologi had
come to deeply resent. Under Marcellus II in Rome, Strada was a
member of the Accademia della Virtù, along with fellow antiquarians
like Antonio Agustin, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Pirro Ligorio and
Onofrio Panvinio28. As a result of this involvement, in 1557, Strada
published two works by Panvinio, the Festivals and Triumphs of
Rome and the Summary of the Roman Popes (Epitome Pontificum).
The first volume was widely criticized for its poor quality, being badly
bound and cheaply produced, and the second volume was published
without Panvinio’s permission, illustrated with plates recycled from
quel, che vien loro in animo di dire, & io li assimiglio a I sogni che rapresentano
e le cose presenti & le passate; ma non mai del tutto come sono, ne come
furono gia» (OROLOGI, L’Inganno, cit., fol. 125).
27
«Vi sono di quelli in Roma chiamati antiquari da ogn’uno; che pigliano
l’impresa di riconoscerli tutti & dicono le piu ladre e manigolde cose del mondo;
come se fossero allhora allhora partiti di làdove sono quelli, a i quali vogliano
che siano simiglianti, I tronchi di marmi spezzati, che si ritrovavano tutto dì»
(ibid.).
28
For some insights into Strada’s career see H. LOUTHAN, The Quest for
Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna, New York &
Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997, and P.H. SMITH - P. FINDLEN, Merchants
& Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, New York,
Routledge, 2002.
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one of Strada’s earlier works29. In fact, most of Strada’s antiquarian
publications have been characterized by Jennifer Fletcher as «a
mixture of erudition and nonsense» and it is probably not accidental
that Titian has so prominently featured Strada’s books as an
indication of his intellectual pretension, precisely the kinds of books
that Orologi criticized as unworthy of the Venetian presses30. As an
antiquarian agent for the Duke of Bavaria, Albrecht V, Strada made
incredible amounts of money, enough to build himself a new home
in Vienna around 1566. It was precisely his practices as an agent that
brought him into conflict with established Venetian patrician and
cittadini values. In 1560, working for Albrecht V and in league with
the agent Nicolo Stoppio, Strada managed to talk the heirs of Andrea
Loredan (whom Stoppio had once called «well over 80, and totally
decrepit, with one foot in the grave») into selling the bulk of the
famous family collection, which he then arranged to have exported
to Munich in the middle of the night. Despite the cash transaction
that took place, Strada’s purchase was performed as though it were
an act of theft which, in some ways, it was – it converted Venetian
cultural currency into cold hard cash, and conferred less status on its
purchaser than was perceived to have been lost by its seller. In 1567,
again as an agent for Duke Albrecht, Strada would return to Venice
to purchase antiques from the heirs of Gabriel Vendramin,
convincing the Vendramin heirs break the term of their elder’s will,
another means of draining patrimony that was patrician, familial and
civic31.
In almost all of the extant Renaissance depictions of a collector
and his collection, three-dimensional sculpture seems to be
accorded the most problematic ontology between nature, artifice
and desire, and presents itself as the most obvious locus for the
intersection of seeing and touching, the most sensible of insensible
matter, the most fully “alive” vestige of a living past. I would argue
that in some of these portraits there is also a hierarchical material
29
For Strada and Panvinio see Introd. in Reading Inscriptions & Writing
Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance, «Bulletin
Institute of Classical studies», 48, S86, 2005, pp. 1-20.
30
Titian, ed. by Ch. Hope & J. Fletcher, London, National Gallery, 2003.
31
See J. ANDERSON, A Further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin's Collection, «The
Burlington Magazine», 121, 1979, 919, pp. 639-648.
118
Sally Hickson The inganno of Giuseppe Orologi
emphasis, in which one might read bronze objects in light of Ovid’s
progression of the ages of man; in the age of bronze men tended to
war but not to impiety, in the iron age that follows men are greedy
and impious, and truth is nowhere to be found.
Much of the Inganno is also concerned with a newly-emergent
class consciousness, an indictment of those who consume art in a
frenzy of conspicuous consumption, misusing it as a means of
immortalizing themselves and establishing a false sense of worth.
Orologi’s condemnation of these practices does not seem motivated
by any sense of moral indignation, only a cynical view of the culture
of collecting, which permits the false elevation of individuals through
their mania for acquisition and display. In the same way, he mentions
in an aside, the networks of the academies permitted the elevation
of literary hacks to the level of public intellectuals32. This latter
sentiment is particularly evident in a long excursus that Orologi
includes on the dangers of the presses that he claims publish all sorts
of scurrilous tracts which only divert the true course of learning and
are printed solely to advance the ambition of their authors33.
Orologi’s dialogue is, therefore, a commentary on the contemporary
culture wars in Venice. It is a criticism of collectors and connoisseurs
who are deceived by the image of themselves they see reflected in
their portraits, amateurs, lost, in their love of objects, caught in a
looking-glass of surfeit beauties, «born back ceaselessly into the
past»34.
ABSTRACT. ‒ This article deals with the dialogue on art and deception found
within Giuseppe Orologi’s broader discussion of contemporary deception in
32
According SCHMITTER, “Virtuous Riches”, cit., p. 918, collecting was «an
excellent forum for competition between groups within the elite and a
particularly useful way to increase social prestige and distinction by
transforming economic capital into cultural capital», especially among the
Venetian cittadino class; see for her analysis of the portrait of Andrea Odoni, ivi,
p. 930.
33
The conversation on writers is found in OROLOGIO, L’Inganno, cit., fols 105123.
34
From the last line of F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby, New York,
Scribners, 1925.
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his work on Inganno (published in Venice in 1562). Beginning with a brief
overview of emblematic representations of the concept of inganno in Ripa
and Alciati, I go on to examine Orologi’s reflections on contemporary
Venetian anxieties about antiquities, authenticity and the perils of collecting
in an age of artistic deception.
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